Davis Foote

Davis completed his degree at UC Berkeley in 2017, after which he joined Google Brain’s Medical Imaging team. In late 2019 he left Google and vowed never to touch a computer again. This proved to be intractable, and he has since pivoted to investigating computational models of human behavior, beliefs, and desires. He hopes to use these models to make “actually enrich people’s lives” a more likely side-effect of abdicating humanity’s decision-making power to black-box optimization systems. At CHAI, he will be working with Micah Carroll on demonstrating and characterizing manipulation by recommender systems trained via reinforcement learning to optimize long-term engagement metrics, as well as on models of preference shifts in humans.